Latent Semantic Indexing & Keyword Selection
Choosing a keyword, search term or phrase for each of your pages of content used to be easy. Once you had selected a high traffic term, just repeat it everywhere and bish, bash, bosh, the traffic rolled in.
Things have changed however, and it’s now important to approach your choice of search terms with a little less gung ho and a little more intelligence.
If you simply repeat the same exact match keywords or phrase over and over in the important on-page elements then you will trigger a spam filter and rank badly.
The important elements that affect your rankings the most are;
- Page Title
- Heading Tag (h1)
- Alt Text for Images
- Page Content
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is word association, related terms that mean the same or similar things. Google understands that a shovel and a spade are closely related, so instead of repeating “Shovel” over and over across the page, you can write naturally using “Spade”, “Digging Tools” etc.
Google adds up similar LSI phrases counting them all towards your overall content relevance. If you search for one of your keywords, you will see in the listings that related keywords are highlighted in the SERPs results.
Keep using natural language and use a variety of different phrasing in your content as well as in your backlinks and you will soon improve your organic search engine rankings.
Still not sure why you don’t rank for your main keywords? See why don’t I rank for my main keywords for in depth information about keyword selection and how you should implement them without over optimizing either your content or your back-link structure.